Looks like the guys in the white lab coats up at U. of Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine have created what they’re calling “Serial Killer” T cells.  These are geneticallly engineered versions of patients’ own T-cells who are suffering from advanced CLL, a very bad leukemia.

This pilot trial of three patients with very few other options for treatment, showed that by removing the patients own T-Cells and modifying them and then putting them back into the patient’s body with new marching orders (so to speak) to seek and destroy the cancer cells. 

And destroy they did….Dr. Carl June, a senior author in this study, said, “We saw at least a 1000-fold increase in the number of modified T cells in each of the patients.  “…the infused T cells are serial killers.  On average, each infused T cell led to the killing of thousands of tumor cells-and overall, destroyed at leasat two pounds of tumor in each patient.” 

Patients had sustained remissions of up to a year in the study.

This breakthrough is 20 years in the making!!  TWENTY YEARS!!!

I guess that gives you an idea of what it takes to break the back of cancer.  This is a big result.  A giant step from the lab to the killing machine that is cancer. 

No doubt the method will be tested on other cancers too.  We can only hope for the same results. 

Super-charged T cells blowing up cancerous tumors…it’s a very pretty picture.